A new platform uses automation to help address the shortage of data scientists

Bottlenose presents data findings in an environment of dashboards and visualization that business people can use.
Photo:
Bottlenose

Automating the work of data scientists will dramatically lower the cost of artificial intelligence and make it easier for business people without advanced tech skills to make use of the latest in business intelligence, says entrepreneur and investor Nova Spivack. His latest startup, Bottlenose, released a new platform on Tuesday that Mr. Spivack says is a step in that direction.

“We saw a lot of technology jump from academic to commercial areas. There is more data and more capability with which to do analytics, but data scientists are increasingly scarce,” Mr. Spivack said in an interview. “We are not producing enough data scientists, and you can’t create enough of these people no matter how hard you try.”

Nova Spivack, founder of Bottlenose
Photo:
Bottlenose

Making matters worse, it takes time for credentialed data scientists to gain enough sufficient experience to be fully functional on the job, he said. His wants to address the dilemma by automating the work of data scientists, applying artificial intelligence to the practice of business intelligence, and presenting these tools in an environment of dashboards and visualization that business people can use. The third version of Bottlenose’s Nerve Center platform, released today, is designed to meet that need, according to Mr. Spivack. It employs streaming data, or the ability to analyze data more or less in real time. The platform incorporates 2 million data sources such as news and social media and also lets clients add their own corporate data, such as email.

The Los Angeles-based startup has raised $28 million from investors including KPMG. It has 11 patents and eight pending, a staff of about 40 people and a group of about 50 customers, according to Mr. Spivack. The idea for the company, he said, was influenced by conversations with his grandfather, the pioneering management consultant and author Peter Drucker.

‘We will eliminate the need to scale data scientists. The system will scale them.’

—Nova Spivack, founder of Bottlenose

Mr. Spivack has a record of his own though, having launched EarthWeb, an early internet company that went public, as well as Dice.com, a tech career site. He later participated in the Darpa CALO program, which he said originated the technology that became Siri, the digital agent now owned by Apple Inc. Mr. Spivack co-founded Radar Networks, which produced the information-organizing tool Twine, now owned by Facebook Inc.

Mr. Spivack said that the latest versions of deep learning employ hundreds of layers of neural networks, which are designed to mimic the way the human mind works. That power can be used in areas such as weak signal detection, or the ability to spot trends more quickly, according to Mr. Spivack. He says that Bottlenose technology was able to predict the outcome of the Brexit vote eight days in advance.

He expects the price of such services to fall to thousands or even hundreds of dollars per user, making them widely available.

“We need to get the price down. 2018, that is when he can say the market is really going to start to inflect,” he said. “We will eliminate the need to scale data scientists. The system will scale them. You will be able to analyze any amount of data in real time and in a distributed and automated way,” he predicted.

He says the widespread adoption of AI will allow people to increasingly leave computation to machines and focus on the associative work in which they excel.

The flip side of such cheap AI, he said, “is there will be no excuse not to use it.